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Global 'Missing DOI' Wikipedia Reference Drift
This page measures how often Wikipedia references lose their DOI links, a process known as ‘reference drift.’ It tracks the proportion of dead DOI links in Wikipedia citations and the median time it takes for a DOI to become inaccessible. The data is derived from regular scans of Wikipedia’s citation database, focusing on references tagged with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Understanding this decay is crucial because it reveals the fragility of scholarly sourcing in the world’s largest encyclopedia, where broken links undermine the reliability of academic citations. By quantifying this issue, the page highlights the need for better maintenance of scholarly references in open knowledge projects.